Re: Can P2P applications learn to play fair on networks?

From: Simon Lyall

Date: Sun Oct 21 19:57:30 2007

On Sun, 21 Oct 2007, Sean Donelan wrote:
> Its not just the greedy commercial ISPs, its also universities,
> non-profits, government, co-op, etc networks. It doesn't seem to matter
> if the network has 100Mbps user connections or 128Kbps user connection,
> they all seem to be having problems with these particular applications.
I'm going to call bullshit here.
The problem is that the customers are using too much traffic for what is
provisioned. If those same customers were doing the same amount of traffic
via NNTP, HTTP or FTP downloads then you would still be seeing the same
problem and whining as much [1] .
In this part of the world we learnt (the hard way) that your income has
to match your costs for bandwidth. A percentage [2] of your customers are
*always* going to move as much traffic as they can on a 24x7 basis.
If you are losing money or your network is not up to that then you are
doing something wrong, it is *your fault* for not building your network
and pricing it correctly. Napster was launched 8 years ago so you can't
claim this is a new thing.
So stop whinging about how bitorrent broke your happy Internet, Stop
putting in traffic shaping boxes that break TCP and then complaining
that p2p programmes don't follow the specs and adjust your pricing and
service to match your costs.
[1] See "SSL and ISP traffic shaping?" at http://www.usenet.com/ssl.htm
[2] - That percentage is always at least 10% . If you are launching a new
"flat rate, uncapped" service at a reasonable price it might be closer to
80%.
--
Simon J. Lyall | Very Busy | Web: http://www.darkmere.gen.nz/
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.